A Star in the Jaws of the Clouds
by Orestes Fasting
Summary: Trials and tribulations of a teenage Enjolras discovering how ideals are put into practice.  Written as a Christmas present for Col. Despard.


Enjolras had very definite ideas about the world when his parents sent him off to school. Like most children of failed marriages, he had a good idea of what not to do with his life; more unusually, especially for a boy just past eleven, he not only had ideas about how things rightfully should be but would later stick by them even as a grown man. In fact, his gift—rare but terribly prized in those times of confusion and ennui that followed the Empire—for conceiving an ideal with perfect ease and lucidity was tempered only by a certain disdain for the details of how to get there, born of the strong-willed child's assumption that he has only to say "I will" and his tenacity will sort out the rest. It was in school that this fault first put his ideas to the test, and in school that he found the means to correct it.

His parents were an instructive example of what to avoid. They had been married in the early years of the Empire, and the war had intervened before they had time to lose their first illusions of each other: when he went off in the first of his many campaigns in the Grande Armée, she still loved him as a brave and honest though penniless soldier, and he still admired her as a celebrated beauty who had foregone wealth and rank to marry him. By the time it became clear that he was a petty tyrant and she a vain, flighty creature, their son was already a toddler, watching with his big serious eyes as they fought whenever his father was home on leave.

His mother, the beauty of the town, was legally the child of a minor noble family but rumored to be an illegitimate offshoot of the illustrious Rubempré line. She had been engaged to a man of twice her age and three times her modest fortune when, in a coup de théâtre that had set the local gossips' tongues wagging for months, she had adopted "radical" ideas and run off with an uneducated corporal in the new Emperor's army. Her parents consented to the marriage to avoid a scandal and she spent several years basking in her victory and her righteousness, but when the reality of her married life set in, she grew to disdain her simple-minded, chronically-absent husband and long for someone who could properly appreciate her. It wasn't long before her discontentment led her to several of what society politely termed _faults._ No one but her son and the doctor knew of her miscarriage in 1813, when her husband had already been away on the Russian campaign for a year; and if the doctor had good reason to keep quiet, being perhaps complicit in the pregnancy as well as in the cover-up of its tragic end, her son's silence seemed accusing. How could a seven-year-old know of such things? And yet he knew, because he watched and listened and knew which uncomfortable questions to ask. Sometimes she would catch him staring fixedly at her with eyes that saw too much, eyes that weighed and found wanting, and nothing—no placating caress, no punishment—could quite make that gaze go away. In truth she had no idea what to do with this child who, far from being a source of unconditional adoration, seemed always to see perfection and see how far from it she was. So for the most part she abandoned him to his nurses and to his own devices, stepping in sometimes to pet and spoil him, sometimes to be harsh with him, always to teach him unintentionally that her caresses were as arbitrary and unmerited as her punishments.

His father came back from the war to find a household removed from his control. His wife was most concerned with dinner-parties and with whoever would pay her the most attention; his son seemed to obey his own code. Nothing could be more infuriating for an officer with clear ideas on rank, authority, and obedience: the family was just as much a hierarchy as the army, and the husband was its commanding officer; a wife who thought herself better than him, a son who would not be subject to discipline, were intolerable, despite—or rather especially because of—the half-million francs of dowry whose interest provided most of the family's income, and his son's disturbing habit of being right. But the more he tightened his grip, the more he felt them slip through his fingers. If he forbade his wife to leave the house, she would be laid up for weeks with some hysteric complaint that required constant care and a steady dose of laudanum. As for the boy, he had a peculiar way of taking a whipping—without protest or apology, but with a sort of exasperated patience—that made his father feel like the guilty one for exercising his rightful authority, and this angered him enough to make him hit his son harder than was strictly merited.

The one thing the couple managed to agree on was that their child be brought up a proper Bonapartist—his father for love of order and might, his mother for love of glory (and perhaps a stiff-necked desire not to lose face in front of her noble family). In practice this consisted chiefly of his mother reading her husband's letters aloud when he was at the front, of trying to instill a healthy admiration for his father's uniform (unsuccessful) and weapons (more successful) when he was home, and teaching the boy how the Emperor had brought unity from the wretched anarchy of the Revolution and spread the glory of France throughout the world. In addition, since his mother so often could not be bothered with him, she would often leave him in the library and encourage him to educate himself, figuring that he would eventually find the small shelf of history containing mostly books on the Roman Empire.

He took to these studies with surprising avidity. Though his mother had not been expecting such ferocious interest, she was glad enough to have him out of his hair, and ordered whatever books he requested once he had gone through the initial supply. These—to her great delight, since she was an educated woman and not blind to historical parallels—were mostly more books on Roman history, then on ancient Greece, then Latin grammars and texts in the original language. She would sometimes boast at parties that she did not even need a tutor to make her son learn Latin, that at the age of eleven he was a veritable expert on the Greeks and Romans and was attempting to read Caesar and Livy in the original. Her education didn't extend to anything so strenuous, so she was hazy on the details of what this entailed, but she was nevertheless proud of him; her husband, likewise, approved on principle, though his education in anything beyond writing and arithmetic was purely practical and he could barely struggle through one history book without falling asleep.

What their son was actually learning while obsessively bathed in antiquity was thus a mystery to both of them until one night when he was about eleven. His father was entertaining dinner-guests, a handful of other soldiers on half-pay. Ordinarily obliged to keep silent on their exploits and their politics by the social climate of the Restoration, they were taking full advantage of this opportunity to meet in private and among fellow Bonapartists. The anecdotes were flowing as freely as the wine—battlefield stories at first, then raunchier tales as the night went on. These the boy paid no attention to, but he was seen stabbing viciously at his mutton when one former officer gave an eyewitness account of the Duc d'Enghien's execution, making no secret of the trumped-up charges and growling his approval of the Emperor for getting such a threat out of the way. Luckily the talk soon turned to less loaded subjects, secondhand tales of the Imperial court, and toasts to the cheap reproduction of Ingres' portrait of Napoleon as First Consul that hung behind the dining room table.

Then an old grenadier, very much in his cups, interrupted some gossip about Mme de Staël's very intimate friendship with Mme Récamier to give his own rambling account of 18 Brumaire. "You may have heard all about it, gentlemen, you may know more about the constitution of the year X than I ever will, but I was there, right there in Paris when it happened. I escorted the Emperor to the Council of the Ancients, I escorted him to the Council of Five Hundred. If you could've seen the look on those doddering fools' faces! To think anyone ever thought them capable of running the country, when what we really needed was—"

"Was a despot, you mean?" It was a child's crystalline voice cutting in, and it carried above the grenadier's voice with perfect distinction. Every eye on the table came to rest on Monsieur Enjolras' son, who stood, his hands balled into fists around his knife and fork. "Aren't any of you ashamed of this—of this tyrant of yours? Loyalty on the battlefield, so be it, but do you really approve of this unlawful seizure of power, these assassinations, these wars of conquest and plunder? You were there when your modern Caesar crossed his Rubicon and you saw the decadence and megalomania and bloodshed that followed, and you still condone it!"

Several of the men laughed into their beards, seeing this boy standing in front of the enormous painted Napoleon, speaking as furiously as if the man himself could hear, and gesticulating angrily with the fork that still had a bit of mutton speared on the end. His parents, however, were white with fury.

"Children," said Madame Enjolras, "should be seen and not heard. If you can't eat here without disgracing us, you won't eat at all. Go wait for your father in his study."

"No," said Monsieur Enjolras, "let him stay and defend himself if he thinks he's so far in the right. What grounds do you have to think you can insult the Emperor like this, my boy? What gives you the right to condemn a man who's greater than you'll ever be? Done more for his country than you could ever do? I suppose you've turned Jacobin, or maybe you've thrown your lot in with the Bourbons, just like everyone else who's bent to cowardice and dishonor since Waterloo, betraying their country and upholding the path of least resistance as a God-given absolute. So tell me, since you always seem to think you're right about everything, what's your justification for this nonsense?"

Enjolras looked from the assembled officers to his parents, then to the portrait looming behind him. Then, his jaw set and his lip curled in a curious mixture of elation, scorn, and indignation, he plunged his dinner knife into the painted Napoleon's chest. "Sic semper tyrannis," he cried, and fled the room.

* * *

His mother found him in the study perfectly composed. She watched him for a moment, torn between annoyance at this open humiliation and a secret pleasure that her husband was so powerfully and yet so impotently furious. "Your father is very angry," she said.

"Of course he is."

"What will you do? I might be able to convince him to go easy on you if you apologize, right now, in front of the gentlemen."

"What would that accomplish? Either way he will lock me out of the study once he finds out what I've been reading. Perhaps if I abase myself enough he will thrash me less. I'd rather take an extra beating than prostitute my integrity."

"You're an incorrigible child, and you should certainly be locked out of the library if that's where you learned to talk about prostitution," she said, and she was smiling despite herself as her secret pleasure won out. "But we're in this together, aren't we? He mistreats us both terribly."

He stared at her warily, his eyes as observant and as unforgiving as ever. Waiting for the hook that followed the bait.

"I mean," she continued falteringly, "we're both better than this, aren't we?"

"You want to use me against him," he said flatly. "Yes, Mother, you do, don't shake your head. You're more interested in feeling wronged than in righting the wrong, aren't you? So long as you can be an object of pity, can make yourself out as the long-suffering victim, it pleases you to have a tyrannical husband."

Her brief swelling of maternal sympathy, as ill-motivated as it might have been, was gone, and he watched her coolly as she swung from manipulative sweetness into fury. "You would do well to learn some resignation yourself," she snapped, "it's a far more virtuous reaction to being wronged than these outbursts of yours. What's got into you tonight? You insult your father in public, and now this—you would hold your tongue if you knew half the times I've intervened with him on your behalf."

"Used me, in other words, as a tool to exasperate him."

"And in your interests, you ungrateful brat. Why, just last night, I—"

"—engaged me without my knowledge or consent to some count's daughter."

Shocked silence.

"I saw his letter," the boy said, "and the remnants of Father's reply on the blotter. Just now, before you came in."

"Is that what you're so angry about? I know it must be a shock, but the wedding will be a long way off, and you'll have plenty of time to get to know the girl. She's very sweet, I've heard. And it's quite an advantageous match, even your father thinks—"

"How many poisoned daggers did you drive into his heart to get him to agree, knowing how much it wounds his pride to have a wife who thinks she married beneath her and puts on airs of being unappreciated and misunderstood? How many of his outbursts are him lording it over you as the husband to keep you from lording it over him as the noble? And how many strings did you pull, how many estranged relatives did you go crawling back to, to trap me in just such a situation?"

"You would not be like him," she cried, seizing his wrist. "Accuse me of what you like, but not of that! Your father is a brute; you are naturally superior. You could marry a duchess and still be unquestionably the master of your household."

"What makes you think," he said, with that same queer expression of elation and outrage and disdain, "that I have any more desire to be a master than I do to be a slave?"

After that night there was nothing for it but to send him off to school, for his own sake as much as for his parents' peace of mind. He had been attending his first year of classes as a day student at the local school in Angoulême, but as soon as the next school year came around he was sent as a boarder to the Collège Royal de Poitiers, the hub school for the whole region and a more rigorous institution—to correct the irregularities in his studies, his mother said; to teach him proper respect for authority, according to his father.

These excuses were more prescient than either parent would have guessed, though not precisely in the ways they imagined. Certainly, years spent in the study absorbing the republics and democracies of antiquity had left grave deficiencies in mathematics, religion, French grammar, geography outside Asia Minor, etc. And to be sure, many of the professors with an interest in keeping the boys in line mistrusted him on instinct, and had no patience for his quiet resistance to arbitrary authority. But he was a quick study, though uninterested in subjects outside history and positively hopeless at music, and a few of his teachers noted with relief that at least one of their charges was neither rambunctious nor pointlessly defiant, and were quick to defend him.

It was neither his idiosyncratic self-education nor his independence that really got him into trouble, but his ideas. For, as can easily be surmised, he had developed a whole worldview in those long days in the library, and it was not adolescent rebellion alone that led to his clashes with his parents. If he weighed and found wanting, it was because he weighed them against ideas so pure and so perfect that he could see nothing but their beauty. The Republic! A country led and determined by itself, that is to say by its own people! Who could fail to hate tyrants and their empty glory next to a country that was glorious because it _was itself_? Who could fail to admire such a system? Who could object to striving towards such a goal?

Such was the subject of one of his first school compositions. When he finished reading it aloud before the class, he was bewildered by the stunned silence it produced and the angry murmur that followed. Professor Dourieu, who was ordinarily one of his greatest defenders, could hardly keep the smoldering wrath from his voice when he interrogated Enjolras in front of the class.

"Do you believe this, young man?"

"Every word."

"And do you know how many of the boys in this room lost their fortunes, their relatives, even their parents to the Revolution? You dare say this to their faces?"

"Frankly, sir, I don't see how that's relevant."

A pin dropped in the back of the classroom would have had about the same effect as a thunderbolt.

"Monsieur Enjolras, do my ears deceive me or did you just read a composition in support of radical republican ideals? Can you be ignorant of how those notions were put into practice, or are you merely callous enough not to care?"

"I admit the Roman Republic had its flaws, sir, but I must confess my ignorance of the Revolution as anything but a period of anarchy and lawless violence."

The murmuring gave way to stifled giggles, and Dourieu sighed. "Please see me in my office so that I may enlighten you. The rest of you are dismissed."

In his office, Dourieu sat his pupil down and looked him very seriously in the eye. "I know you are not a practical joker or a rabble-rouser, which is why I am taking you at your word for the moment and not reporting this directly to my superiors. If this ignorance is a face-saving sham, it's unworthy of you, and I would rather see you hold despicable beliefs openly than hide behind such excuses. If you are genuine, what could have prompted such pointed remarks on tyrants and striving towards democratic rule?"

Enjolras, instead of looking contrite or curious, was beginning to look distressed. "All my knowledge comes from ancient sources," he said, "and all my knowledge of recent history comes from my father, who was a soldier in the wars. All he taught me was that the Revolution was a time of lawlessness and bloodshed that the Empire set right—he wanted me to believe Buonaparte" (Enjolras had picked up this pronunciation from his peers) "was justified in trying to subjugate all Europe. If my speech referred to recent events at all, it was to Buonaparte and his despotism."

Dourieu shook his head. "Then you know nothing of the so-called French Republic and the atrocities committed in the name of liberating the people from their legitimate monarch?"

"No, sir," Enjolras said quietly, "and it grieves me to learn that terrible things have been done in the service of such a beautiful idea. But aren't the people a more legitimate sovereign than one man? Can it be wrong to strive for a more perfect government without committing atrocities or staging a revolution?"

"I suppose," said Dourieu wryly, "that our first duty as teachers is to make you into fine upstanding subjects and instill respect for God, king, and country into you, but I never imagined having to disabuse a twelve-year-old of republican notions because he knows nothing of the Revolution. I'll contact the chaplain. Father Xavier lived through the thick of those events, and he is best suited to teach you about them—let's say an hour of extra lessons every Monday afternoon. And in the meantime, here's something for you to ponder: how do you propose to strive towards a republic that will replace a king with no reason to give up his throne, if not by revolution?"

Enjolras left this interview outwardly looking mildly troubled and inwardly feeling as though he had just been stabbed in the gut. The feeling was repeated after every lesson with Father Xavier. How could something as pure as the Republic take on a form as monstrous as the Revolution? Worse, how could such a monstrosity be necessary to bring about such perfection?

It was not the impossibility of achieving true perfection that galled him. He had spent too much time with one eye fixed on the infinite and the other witnessing human limitations to be surprised that the heavens were out of his mortal reach. But he had always seen a linear progression in front of him: work tirelessly towards the goal, do everything within his power to get as close as he could, and if he still could not reach then at least others could follow and climb on his shoulders. To be told that all his lofty political ideas were impossible and subject to human frailty would hardly have given him pause, habituated as he was to perceiving the ideal through a wall of crystal that allowed him to see but not to touch. No, the disturbing thing was to see the password etched on the crystal gate and know that he had only to speak its blasphemies to put a crack in the wall.

This discovery, that an ideal like the Republic was only impossible if one would not embrace a monstrosity like the Revolution that upturned every natural law, shook him to the core. He did not question his instinctive revulsion towards revolution, particularly not once Father Xavier had given him a thorough course on its excesses and atrocities. Nor did he give up his veneration for his original ideals despite the best efforts of his teachers to make a proper legitimist of him. The Revolution simply appeared to him as a grotesque aberration with the name of the sublime on its lips, a fiery nightmare where demons rampaged and murdered using the swords of archangels. He could admire the sublime without signing his soul away to see it realized, could he not? But he withdrew from any talk of politics and even from history, which left him strangely diminished. Some of his old assurance remained, but the righteous watchfulness of his gaze was dimmed: his opinions, he reflected, were irrelevant if they could not be put into practice without atrocity.

Just before coming to school, and without his parents' knowledge, he had written an icily polite letter to the family of the girl they wanted him to marry. He regretted, in the most formal language he could muster by imitating his father's business correspondence, to inform them that the engagement had been made on false pretenses, that they were under no obligation to abide by an agreement he had not been party to and could not in good conscience uphold, that their daughter could seek a more suitable match, etc. Now that he considered the public sphere more-or-less irrelevant to his life, he began to think more seriously about the private side of his life.

At fourteen, he considered the matter dispassionately and concluded, with all the solemnity of a child with no personal experience in the matter, that surely he had been too hard on his parents, but that it would never do to end up in such a marriage. Equal partnership was best—let neither party be disproportionately beholden to the other, let neither be master of the other, let it be a common bond of trust, affection, and fraternity. The Republic of love if not the Republic of government. And if fraternity and equal footing were impossible in marriage—which seemed likely, given the girls he had met and the laws that made the husband master of his wife—well, surely he would find the Nisus to his Euryalus. The idea was vague, but it made a great deal of sense in his head.

At fifteen and in full bloom of puberty, these thoughts stopped being a purely theoretical exercise. Several potential Nisuses presented himself to his imagination, most of them boys he had found perfectly uninteresting before. He shocked the old drawing-master, who taught a bit of art history on the side and was used to teenage boys developing a sudden interest in Greek Aphrodites, by becoming passionate about male nudes, athletes and warriors—"I never knew a boy his age to truly appreciate pagan sculpture like he does for its artistic appeal, not its carnal appeal," he was once heard to say. Matters were compounded when he went home that Christmas, attended a ball to please his mother, was presented to a number of beautiful young ladies, and spent most of the evening being enchanted by the company of their brothers. He knew full well that this behavior was ridiculous and refused to let his body's new demands push him into commonplace boarding-school sodomy; underneath the tempestuous desires of adolescence, he held out hope that he would find a boy (and by now it was obvious that it would have to be a boy) with whom he could have a deeper partnership along the lines of the one he had imagined.

All this came to a head when he fell in love with Julien de Ravignan. Ravignan was older; he was about to sit his bac and leave for medical school if he scored well enough; he too was bright and seemed above most of the other boys' pettiness; he too obeyed his own code, but was caught more often than Enjolras and was more often punished once caught. Most importantly, he had had several close, intimate friendships with other boys, and it didn't hurt—not that shallow physical details were important of course—that he had arresting green eyes in a fine-boned face framed by his dark curls.

His first attempts to insinuate himself into Ravignan's company were fruitless, but eventually, by dint of perseverance, he succeeded in striking up a conversation before chapel one morning. Happily Ravignan seemed to take to him as soon as he realized he was interested; most unhappily, the conversation was so animated that it continued in whispers during Mass. One of the professors stopped them on the way out. "I heard your voice, Monsieur de Ravignan, when it should have been silent; please see me this afternoon to—"

"Sir," said Enjolras, feeling prickly and protective and eager to shield his new friend from punishment, "it was my voice you heard, he was only telling me to be quiet."

"All right, Monsieur Enjolras, then you will be the one copying lines while everyone else is at recreation."

Ravignan was waiting for him when he emerged from the classroom stretching his aching hand. "Thanks," he said.

"What for?"

"Taking the blame for me. You didn't have to." Ravignan was looking at him warmly, and Enjolras started feeling oddly flushed all over.

"Well," he said, "you get punished for things I get away with all the time, maybe it's time to even the score."

"I don't want to see you punished on my account," said Ravignan, and was it Enjolras' imagination that his voice had a solicitous undertone? "Maybe you can show me how not to get caught so often."

Enjolras was strangely elated and embarrassed all at once, and surely it wasn't equal or fraternal to feel so small and awkward next to his beloved, or to suddenly feel taller and greater now that Ravignan was being friendly. "It's mostly luck," he said, "and the conviction that you're not doing anything wrong."

Ravignan looked him up and down, taking in his blush and his diffident eagerness with an appraising eye. "God," he said under his breath, "you've got it bad, don't you."

"Got what?"

"Puppy love, the boarding-school epidemic," said Ravignan, and slipped an arm around Enjolras' waist, making him tremble all over. "Fortunately I know how to administer the only surefire remedy. Let's get somewhere more private than this hallway, shall we?"

So saying, he tugged Enjolras into a broom closet, shut the door, and began kissing him.

Was this what had been missing from his fantasies of passionate friendship? He had wanted to be close to Ravignan, infinitely close. "I love you," he whispered, but Ravignan was busy covering his face with hot sticky kisses and didn't seem to hear. "Julien," he said.

"Hmmmm?" Ravignan's hands were far more communicative than his mouth, sliding and grabbing and fumbling with an off-putting assurance, as if he knew that the body before him was rightfully his. "This was what you wanted, wasn't it?"

Enjolras opened his mouth to voice the doubts that had suddenly sprung up in his mind, but then Ravignan was kissing him, sweetly and passionately, the way he'd wanted to be kissed. He gave in to his affection. "I'd do anything for you."

This seemed to be all the reassurance Ravignan needed. He nodded—it was too dark to see but Enjolras could feel it—and started tugging at buttons and fastenings until somehow, it wasn't clear quite how, Enjolras' trousers were down around his knees and Ravignan's hands were exploring places he had barely ever dared to touch. Ravignan must have felt him recoil instinctively but he kept going, confident in his victory. Enjolras was already sure that whatever this was, it wasn't what he wanted, and he was about to say so when he felt Ravignan's finger force its way up into—

He didn't even realize he was struggling until he heard a series of dull thuds and realized he was kicking frantically at the door of the broom closet. Ravignan was just beginning to ask him what was wrong when the door yielded as if by magic, and Enjolras was about to bolt when his arm was seized in an iron grip. An iron grip that came from outside.

It was Father Xavier who had opened the door.

* * *

Father Xavier dragged them into an empty classroom, and, in flagrant violation of school regulations, thrashed them with a ruler like recalcitrant six-year-olds. Then, when he was quite sure that the humiliation had killed their ardor, he sat them down and subjected them to a lecture that almost burned their ears off. Then he let them go.

"I'm required to report any incidents like this," he told them. "If the director finds out he will have grounds to expel you and would probably go through with it, and he'd certainly write to your parents with all the sordid details and refuse to write the attestations of good character that you, Monsieur de Ravignan, need for the École de Médecine. It's my belief that this is unduly harsh for a first offense of this nature. You are boys, you have desires you don't know what to do with, you were led into it through error, and thus you need discouragement rather than dishonor. So consider this your warning, and don't fall into the trap of thinking such vices are quietly tolerated here. I'll have an eye on you both, and next time there will be no leniency."

Ravignan nodded mechanically throughout the lecture and rolled his eyes whenever Father Xavier wasn't looking. Enjolras, numb, realized that he considered the whole sordid affair—casual rolls in the hay with other boys, taking advantage of lovestruck hangers-on, the terrible thing he had been about to do to Enjolras—not to be a big deal, and that he had probably done this many times. When they were dismissed, Ravignan muttered, "You really do get away with everything," into Enjolras' ear and fled.

Enjolras stayed. "Father—" he began.

"Don't argue with me on this, I beg of you. I've bent enough rules already. I don't want to hear an apologia for buggery the way I heard an apologia for mob rule when you first had lessons with me."

"It's not that, Father. I don't question your right to punish us for this. I would rather have my backside smarting from a well-deserved beating than from what Julien de Ravignan was about to do."

"Why were you in the broom closet with him, then?"

Enjolras stared at his knees. "I was in love with him. Foolishly, perhaps, but not perversely. I wanted—to please him, yes, but also to be one with him, and I never imagined it would happen like that."

"What do you want me to do, apologize for hitting you?"

"No," said Enjolras in exasperation, "I know it was wrong, I can feel it in my bones. I want to know how something so repulsive can emerge from something so pure. I want to know if such loves can ever be consummated in ways that don't mean upending every notion of right and wrong, male and female, natural and unnatural."

"They cannot," said Father Xavier, and there was compassion in his eyes. "Loves like that are doomed, either to unnatural practices or to a friendship that torments because it always wants to be something more. I suggest you try to avoid them. In all likelihood you'll grow out of them once you have girls around you."

Enjolras shook his head.

"Most boys grow out of it," said Father Xavier reassuringly.

"And some don't?"

"Some don't," he admitted.

"And what are they to do? When they cannot reach for love, the most sublime love of all, the ideal made flesh, without grasping an adder?"

Father Xavier closed his eyes. The boy was beautiful, still innocent. It hurt to see him in pain and know there was no comfort to offer. "Chastity, for those strong enough. A series of errors and failings and sterile liaisons for those who aren't. Some become priests and seal their celibacy with the most solemn of vows."

Enjolras looked up at him, and there was compassion in his eyes now as well. "You were one of them, weren't you?"

Father Xavier couldn't quite bring himself to look in those eyes, which still had a strange piercing quality, even diminished and defeated as they were now. To avoid answering, he said quietly, "All is vanity. Every human soul yearns for the divine—what you call the ideal—and every human soul is incapable of attaining it on this earth, bound as we are by original sin and by the dust we are, the dust to which we shall return. Men like you and me are simply chosen to understand this more quickly and more bitterly than other men, that we may sooner be brought to contemplate God, the only true source of perfection."

Enjolras bowed his head.

* * *

And so it was that when Courfeyrac first came to the Collège Royal de Poitiers, Enjolras had all but renounced his ideals. It was not, precisely, the vanity of Father Xavier's speech that troubled him. He would happily have spent his life bridging the abyss that separated the real and the sublime. But it seemed that the longer he stared into that abyss, the more monsters began to stare back at him and to offer their backs as bridges to cross it. The more he probed that fault line within himself, within society, within humanity, the deeper and more disturbing it revealed itself to be. Having broken himself on society and on love, he was throwing himself on that final and most inexorable ideal, that of religion. In all likelihood he would leave to study for the priesthood once he graduated. When Courfeyrac first met him he was reserved, severe, taciturn, a shadow of his former self.

Courfeyrac at the Collège Royal had roughly the effect of a live firework lobbed into a box of cartridges. He was, in a word, incorrigible. Like Enjolras, he had been sent there after causing too much trouble living at home as a day student at the local collège, but his parents had objected not so much to his defiance (which he had, gleefully, in spades) as to his habit of seducing the chambermaids. Or at least that was the word going around among his classmates. Whatever the original incident had been, it grew, fed on rumor and exaggeration, until Courfeyrac had acquired the reputation of a veritable sixteen-year-old Don Juan. Enjolras, unaware that Courfeyrac was perhaps not as complicit in this reputation as he appeared, wasn't sure whether to be charmed or extremely irritated by him. To keep from finding out, he did his best to avoid him.

Courfeyrac, however, was not very easy to avoid. Was he really more ubiquitous than the other students, or was he just impossible to ignore? Hard to say. At any rate, there he was, talking back at the professors and sneaking off to smoke pipes with the kitchen wenches and generally making himself noticeable. The most irritating thing about him was that underneath his habitual flippancy he often had opinions Enjolras agreed with, and he would champion them in what Enjolras considered the most counterproductive ways imaginable.

"What's this?" he cried indignantly one morning, waving his copy of Cicero in the air. "I sat down last night to read our assigned excerpt of _Pro Caelio_, and all the interesting parts had been taken out!"

The master of rhetoric turned a baleful gaze on him. "The edition designated for the school system has been carefully prepared to demonstrate the finest of classical rhetoric without polluting the minds of France's next generation. If you've already read a different edition, you should know that this is the only version authorized within these walls."

"But Professor," Courfeyrac went on, assuming an air of studied innocence, "you know as well as I do that we, France's glorious future, are mostly destined to be fodder for the law school—no disrespect to my fellow classmates intended by such a slur, as it's the truth. Will we not see such cases brought before us? Should we not have a full instructive example available to us? Won't it be useful, in our coming illustrious careers, to know we can get our client off scot-free by calling his accuser's sister a whore?"

"That is enough, Monsieur de Courfeyrac!"

"And if we're to properly judge the classical authors, shouldn't we know that character assassination that would make Parisian journalists blush was among their rhetorical arsenal?"

This earned Courfeyrac two solid afternoons spent copying lines. Enjolras quietly approached the professor after class and said, "As much as I disagree with M. de Courfeyrac's methods, he has a point. We aren't twelve anymore, sir, and an unexpurgated edition of Cicero would hardly influence our morals. Is there no way to petition the committee to allow students in following years to have a less, ah, doctored version?"

"Undoubtedly," said the professor. "I'll make a note of it." His surly tone suggested that even if such a note were ever written, it would languish in the back of a drawer till Kingdom Come. Enjolras left triply annoyed—annoyed with the professor for not listening to reason, annoyed with Courfeyrac for ruining a valid point with his disruptions, annoyed with himself for standing up to such behavior indirectly.

Courfeyrac must have heard about it too, because from then on he treated Enjolras as a co-conspirator and a friendly ear. "Down with Bossuet," he would whisper in Enjolras' ear during the selfsame rhetoric class, "a pox on Bossuet, and may he never orate at my funeral. His perversity is on a level all its own—it takes talent to diminish your subject thus. Bossuet's poor queen, once he's through with her, seems a lesser figure than Catullus's sparrow. I hope someone will give me a pagan eulogy when I die." This earned them both an afternoon spent standing in opposite corners of the courtyard during the recreation period, forbidden to talk to anyone—Courfeyrac for whispering, Enjolras for laughing despite himself.

As he was standing in his solitary corner watching the sky, something hit him in the back of the head. It was a balled-up piece of paper. Enjolras checked to make sure he was unobserved, smoothed out the paper, and read:

"_Have plans to get us some proper reading material. Meet me in the first-floor broom closet after dinner in two days. —C"_

Why did Courfeyrac consider him a partner in crime? Plenty of the other students were smart-mouthed enough to appreciate his comments better, and even more of them were rambunctious enough to participate happily in his escapades. Why had he chosen to bestow—or was it to inflict?—his company on Enjolras, who was quiet and well-behaved and mere steps away from the seminary? Enjolras still wasn't quite sure whether Courfeyrac amused or exasperated him. And now he was obliged to worry about the first-floor broom closet, whether they would be caught sneaking in forbidden books, and whether what Courfeyrac wanted there was merely the same thing Ravignan had wanted.

Nevertheless, he showed up at the appointed time. Courfeyrac did not try to kiss him. He had brought a lamp, and once the door was safely closed behind them he set it down and began to rummage through the pails and mops.

"What's all this about, anyway?" said Enjolras.

"Just what the note said. I got one of the day students to smuggle in some more edifying reading. If all went according to plan, it should be—right—here." Courfeyrac turned over a shabby-looking bucket buried at the back of the closet to reveal a small stack of books. "Good, he got almost all of them. Some novels by Benjamin Constant and Mme de Staël—Rousseau's Confessions—and, ah, I didn't think he'd be able to get hold of this one!" He held out a tatty-looking book whose cover said, simply, History of the French Revolution.

Enjolras stiffened. "There must be some mistake."

"Really? Cazot told me you were a republican." Courfeyrac looked him up and down. "Aren't you?"

"I support democratic principles. I don't support putting them into practice through rebellion, anarchy, and atrocities. I'm a republican, not a revolutionary."

"Just last week I met a Bonapartist democrat, but I think this tops that in absurdity. Where on earth did you learn to think that way?"

Enjolras gave him a short explanation, and Courfeyrac looked at him wide-eyed. "Really? You've been led all wrong. You need to read this book."

"What can it matter? In an ideal world we wouldn't be ruled by kings, but I won't advocate violent revolt just for the sake of it."

"Just like with the professors," said Courfeyrac thoughtfully. "You must've realized by now that your quiet, oh-so-polite suggestions don't fare any better than open challenges. Worse, in fact, because they can ignore you but they can't ignore me. Are you going to give up on the way you think things should be just because some bully in a professorial robe told you no?"

"That doesn't justify..."

"Justify what? Going along quietly and making yourself complicit? I'll tell you what, read the book and get back to me on this. Know something about the Revolution before you dismiss it out of hand."

"And what will you do in return?"

"In return? I'll—why, I'll keep my mouth shut in public until you're done reading it."

Courfeyrac had to keep his mouth shut in public for exactly one day. Enjolras confronted him the next morning, white-faced and hollow-eyed and looking very much like he'd been reading all night instead of sleeping. "Who wrote that book?" he demanded. "Is it true, or Jacobin propaganda?"

"Does it matter?" said Courfeyrac. "The author is anonymous to prevent government reprisal, and yes he has clear opinions, but it's impossible to write about the Revolution without having an opinion. What matters is that now you've seen both sides. Before you'd only heard of what made the Revolution terrible; now you've heard of what made it great. Form your own conclusions."

Enjolras spent the next few days in a sort of shock. It seemed like he was twelve years old again and writing his first composition on the Republic without knowing about the Revolution—only this time the Revolution was revealed to him, not as a monster defiling the sublime but as sublimity itself. A people taking its destiny into its own hands though beset on all sides by despotism! A struggle, against all odds, to establish a France ruled by the French: a country great because it _was itself_. Not the Bourbons, not the aristocracy, but itself and the whole of itself. Even the Terror appeared in a new light, a stark and red but terribly pure light of ideals pushed to their extremes as all the crowned heads of Europe banded together to crush this upstart people that wanted to rule itself.

For the first time in five years, Enjolras dared turn his eyes from the ideal to the chasm that separated it from the present. He gazed into it and looked what emerged from it in the eye. And the thing he had found so grotesque, that violent overthrow of every accepted and immutable idea, was now smiling at him with a charming catlike smile and inviting him to close the gap.

For the first time in five years, Enjolras felt like he was seeing clearly.

At Enjolras and Courfeyrac's instigation, there was an epidemic of republicanism at the Collège Royal de Poitiers. No one knew quite how those books were passed around and avoided detection, but avoid it they did, to the great ire of the teachers. Revolutionary talk became so widespread that when the spring of 1823 rolled around and Enjolras and Courfeyrac were preparing to sit the baccalaureat exam, the Spanish expedition was on everyone's lips. Would Louis XVIII dare crush the liberal insurection in Spain and restore Ferdinand VII to the throne? Would the French monarchy conquer where even the French empire had failed? Would the troops, so many of them veterans of the Empire and the Revolution, really obey their Bourbon masters and put down a revolt, or would they defect? Courfeyrac, and now Enjolras as well, spent many a Saturday writing lines or solving tedious algebra problems in retaliation for answering these questions too bluntly and too publically.

It was strange how natural revolt felt when one was with Courfeyrac, how simple it was to speak truth to power and reassert one's natural rights. The only monstrosity in Enjolras' life anymore was the injustice and censorship they were facing. Students were not to be involved in politics. Students were especially not to be involved in liberal politics or anything that might put their loyalty to God, king and country in question. The more bitterly they complained, the harsher the reprisals became.

On the eve of the invasion of Spain, it was announced that the troops from the nearest garrison would receive a proper send-off from the whole town. Speeches, parades, girls with flowers, and most importantly for the boys of the Collège Royal, a delegation of schoolboys to pay their respects and perform a patriotic song in honor of the French crown.

Enjolras and Courfeyrac, being near the top of their class, were all but obliged to take part, even though neither of them could sing and they were both in disgrace with most of the professors. They were therefore given the least desirable task in the whole thing, that of holding an enormous banner with the white flag of the Restoration and carrying it through the parade. They received this news stony-faced, and when they were alone, Courfeyrac said, "You know we have to do something. Something special, in honor of the occasion."

The preparations for the send-off took six days. Enjolras and Courfeyrac's preparations took six nights of frantic work and all of Courfeyrac's charm and connections.

Everything went smoothly up until the schoolboys' ceremony. The soldiers marched down the main thoroughfare in parade uniform, the girls in their white dresses threw flowers, the mayor gave a speech. The schoolboys were lined up in neat ranks with their blue uniforms spotless and their gold fleur-de-lys buttons gleaming, Enjolras and Courfeyrac at the back, holding up the white flag of the Bourbons. Then—perhaps it was an errant gust of wind, perhaps their arms were tired from carrying the heavy poles through the parade—the banner dropped. There was a polite pause while they labored to get it back up again. In the meantime, the sheet music was passed out to the boys who were to be singing.

Then two commotions broke out at the same time. One was among the students, when they noticed that their sheet music was not the song they'd learned. The other, much louder one was among the crowd, because the flag that had been raised back up was not the white flag of the Bourbons. It was the tricolor flag of the Republic.

Then, over the tumult, two voices rang out, off-key but full of enthusiasm.

"_Allons, enfants de la patrie_

_Le jour de gloire est arrivé..."_

Tentatively, some of the boys in the choir began to join in. Others threw their music away in disgust and tried to silence the miscreants, but it was too late, the crowd had picked up the refrain. Here and there, groups of soldiers defied their superior officers, and their collective baritone gave the students courage: "_Aux armes, citoyens! Formez vos bataillons!"_

Then a shot rang out, fired into the air but enough to restore silence, and the boys were hurriedly marched away. But it was enough.

Enjolras and Courfeyrac were dragged into the director's office. Nobody even bothered to lecture them. Professor Dourieu and Father Xavier were there, staring at Enjolras, making their disappointment known in looks better than it could ever have been expressed in words, but he didn't care, and it was with a curious mixture of elation, indignation, and scorn that he accepted full responsibility for "this outrage" for himself and Courfeyrac, denied the involvement of outside agitators, and confessed to the nights spent sewing the tricolor flag and writing out the sheet music by hand.

"The only thing left to decide," said the director, "is whether you will be punished by this institution's standards or expelled and turned over to the outside authorities. We will deliberate on this question in the other room. Wait here."

When they were gone, Courfeyrac turned to Enjolras with a wry grin. "Do you regret it, Monsieur Non-Revolutionary Republican?"

"Not for a moment," said Enjolras.

Courfeyrac slipped an arm around his waist, and Enjolras felt warmth steal through him from head to foot. Everything seemed so natural when Courfeyrac was involved. It wasn't, exactly, that the fault line, that instability deep within between mind and matter, ideal and reality, was gone; it was simply that what emerged from it was exciting rather than unsettling. And Enjolras realized, with a jolt, that the Revolution wasn't the only monster that Courfeyrac had transformed into a chimaera. He slid closer to Courfeyrac on the bench and returned the embrace.

Courfeyrac smiled at him, and they sat there, full of hope and confidence, to await their fate.


End file.
